At least among the players I talk to here (and language is apt to skew that sample) there were a lot of people who took time off for Diablo III and don't plan to return until MoP hits.

There is also a certain, unpleasant sense of deja vu that goes along with the announcement that MoP will be delayed for an unspecified time for the mainland. Nobody wants to see a rehash of the WotLK mess and players are getting tired of always seeing content well after it is old hat for the rest of the community. Unfortunately, because of the government approval system we're not likely to see that change and the locally produced games are getting much better. Why wait for MoP when one can hop over to Loong3D and get something that is specifically designed to appeal to local aesthetics and play styles?

____________________________

In Chinese: glasses are yanjing; eyes are yanjing, and the beer of Beijing is Yanjing. When speaking, the difference is in the tones. Did I just order a glass of beer or a glass of eyes?

Dragon Soul was a weak raid and no new content, so everyone guessed it was going to go down but I think most were shocked by how many.

It will be interesting to see the numbers after MoP launches, but Q1 2013 will be very interesting and it will be very interesting to see what happens when the 1.25 million annual pass subs end. Edited, Aug 3rd 2012 12:43am by bodhisattva

And yeah, I'd blame it on DIII. People spinning their wheels take a hiatus to check out the new shiny.

I'm not so sure about this, as plenty of people bought the annual subscription to get DIII for free. They might have stopped playing WoW during that time, but they were still subscribed.

(Also, I'm one of those unsubscribed people I'll be back in a few weeks when the pre-expansion patch comes out... but months with absolutely nothing new just meant I had absolutely nothing I wanted to do)

I dislike how they handled D3. It's one fourth of a game that costs full price. To get your money's worth, you'll have to play the game four times, which is what Blizzard had in mind. Why the **** anyone would want to do that is beyond me. Sure, the mobs get harder as you increase the difficulty, but it's still the same story.

Blizzard had ten years and Mass Effect 3 still had a better ending than Diablo 3.

____________________________

Please "talk up" if your comprehension white-shifts. I will use simple-happy language-words to help you understand.

IIRC something like 10million D3 copies, and just over 10% of those were from the annual pass or something. But, yeah, count me among those who didn't expect to see that large of a drop, but I really have no clue about the "East" market, and if MoP is being delayed for a while I can see why people may well be giving it a pass. I guess I'm not wholly surprised though. I mean the core of the game is getting a bit aged now, and there's a lot of other options out there to steal people away.

I suppose we see where things stand once MoP gets up and running again. Still, all that does give the impression that things have kinda peaked with WoW. Will be interesting to see what happens next.

Blizzard had ten years and Mass Effect 3 still had a better ending than Diablo 3.

Oh, you didn't just go there, did you?

But then I suppose I can't say much, I've never seen D3's ending, but I can't imagine ANYTHING being worse than ME3's ending, especially the "new" 4th ending they gave it (which is basically a direct TakeThat insult to the Playerbase, even Tvtropes thinks so).

So you clear the game and then you can do it again on another difficulty level.

I fail to see why that's any different than Diablo 1 or Diablo 2 -- they did the same thing. And Diablo2 was about the same length as 3 (from what I've seen thusfar), though it also had the expansion (which I'm sure they'll do for D3 at some point, make an Act5 expansion).

Though I don't remember Diablo 2 retailing for no $59.99, but I suppose we can chalk that up to Inflation IRL.

I didn't expect much in terms of story from D3, I just wanted to hack and slash the everliving crap out of the legions of ****. I have no "leet skills" when it comes to Diablo, no legendary beast mode pwnage, in fact I would consider myself Medium to low medium on the skill bracket and Normal mode was like playing a retarded kid at chess. I think it pretty much is a perfect microcosm of Blizzards "everyone wins" mentality. The next step up wasn't much more difficult, though it obviously ramped up on the final level to uber hard.

But if the story was lame, the game was ****** easy & I had to play through it 2 more times to get a level of difficulty that is best described as "self flagellation", then I figured it would be best not to continue.

As for MoP, someone on MMO Champ tried to make the argument that the staggered release of raid content actually coincides with AP's ticking over so it might be a way to get an extra month or two of subs. Blizz just needs to start turning content out faster, because it is hitting their subscriptions and there is more and more competition and while no one game will "kill wow", a bunch of them (along with long development times and rehashed content by Blizz) will continue to bleed them dry over the long run, even if MoP launch brings them back to 10million subs.

But then I suppose I can't say much, I've never seen D3's ending, but I can't imagine ANYTHING being worse than ME3's ending, especially the "new" 4th ending they gave it (which is basically a direct TakeThat insult to the Playerbase, even Tvtropes thinks so).

The chick you've been protecting from the Forces of Evil turns out to be Diablo's new hatching nest (who'da thunk it, just because she was the love child of Diablo and some witch...). Diablo hatches (now with boobs), wrecks Heaven, but you kill him-- err, her and Diablo is banished once more. Except the black soulstone falls to Earth, leaving everyone unsure what the @#%^ just happened.

Lyrailis wrote:

I fail to see why that's any different than Diablo 1 or Diablo 2 -- they did the same thing. And Diablo2 was about the same length as 3 (from what I've seen thusfar), though it also had the expansion (which I'm sure they'll do for D3 at some point, make an Act5 expansion).

The previous two games worked in pretty much the same way, yes, but things change. Developers nowadays either make games that require a supercomputer to run, or they make games with 200+ hours of gameplay. Sometimes, they do both and video game evolution takes a huge leap forward. Blizzard did neither.

D3, from what I can tell, uses the same engines as StarCraft 2; it's basically a repainted Heart of the Swarm. It looks good for an isometric game, but it's nothing revolutionary. I guess not a lot of people know this, but Dragon Age: Origins had isometric view if you zoomed all the way out. That's why you could click on the ground to move your character. Now compare DA:O to D3.

D3, from what I can tell, also lacks a lengthy playthrough. Casual players report "finishing the game" (by this I mean finishing the story) in around 12 hours due to being forced to play on the easiest difficulty the first time through. 60 bucks for 12 hours of entertainment. Are you kidding me? I can download a free game and get more entertainment than that. For free!

Of course, if you play the game again on the other difficulties, you get more "entertainment" for your money, but it's still the same story. Hang on, I think I'm onto something here...

Here's a modified version of an older game that you can finish in one hour. It costs 60 bucks. "Why would I want to pay that much?" Because you can replay the one-hour game 60 times and each time gets progressively more difficult than the last. "OMG, take my money! Now!"

***** teaching, I'm going to make a video game. Just need to buy the IP of some old game and relaunch it with 60 difficulties.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2012 5:44pm by Mazra

____________________________

Please "talk up" if your comprehension white-shifts. I will use simple-happy language-words to help you understand.

D3, from what I can tell, also lacks a lengthy playthrough. Casual players report "finishing the game" (by this I mean finishing the story) in around 12 hours due to being forced to play on the easiest difficulty the first time through. 60 bucks for 12 hours of entertainment. Are you kidding me? I can download a free game and get more entertainment than that. For free!

Of course, if you play the game again on the other difficulties, you get more "entertainment" for your money, but it's still the same story. Hang on, I think I'm onto something here...

Here's a modified version of an older game that you can finish in one hour. It costs 60 bucks. "Why would I want to pay that much?" Because you can replay the one-hour game 60 times and each time gets progressively more difficult than the last. "OMG, take my money! Now!"

Something like that.

Normal and Nightmare were definitely just way to easy to be content you want to spend time on. For myself at least, the gameplay started getting interesting about midway through ****, and actually became something you have to pay attention while playing. At that point it was a little frustrating for me because, while it wasn't terribly difficult, but it started become long kiting sessions. If I can't be interrupted for like 3-5 minutes while kiting some random elite thingies, it becomes something I could only play after the kids went down.

That's fine and all, but when they're awake I'll need something else to do. At that point having played the game over like 5-6 times between the different levels of difficulty, and different classes, it's hard to want to play it a 7th time "just for fun" or to earn a little extra gold. Still want to pick it back up, because there is challenging solo play, which is something I've sorely missed in WoW over the last couple of years, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it because I'm apparently old or something.

Which I guess is WoW's appeal. There's a lot you can do in the game that doesn't take a lot of time, and where being interrupted isn't a big deal.

I would still bet that Blizz will top 10 million subscriptions once MoP comes out, wouldn't be too surprised if they break 11 million. Furthermore, Blizz has been very generous with the SoR recently, if for some reason MoP does not meet sales expectations, I think they'll introduce a new perk to entice players back.

Then again, even at 9 million players it still has no direct competitor and it's just a cash cow for Blizzard.

I dislike how they handled D3. It's one fourth of a game that costs full price. To get your money's worth, you'll have to play the game four times, which is what Blizzard had in mind. Why the **** anyone would want to do that is beyond me. Sure, the mobs get harder as you increase the difficulty, but it's still the same story.

I did it because apparently I have a masochistic streak, and slamming my genitals into a car door just didn't sound bad enough. Exaggeration, but still.

Lyrailis wrote:

Mazra wrote:

Blizzard had ten years and Mass Effect 3 still had a better ending than Diablo 3.

Oh, you didn't just go there, did you?

But then I suppose I can't say much, I've never seen D3's ending, but I can't imagine ANYTHING being worse than ME3's ending, especially the "new" 4th ending they gave it (which is basically a direct TakeThat insult to the Playerbase, even Tvtropes thinks so).

The difference between Mass Effect and D3: ME3 may have had a sh*tty ending, but with the exception of the last ten minutes, at least the story wasn't completely ridiculous.